Harvard magazine has an excellent interview with three scientists, Michael Mina, Douglas Melton and Stuart Schreiber, all highly regarded in their fields of life sciences, who have recently left Harvard for the private sector.
Why did they leave? Mina tells an incredible story of what happened during the pandemic. At the time Mina was a faculty member at the Chan School of Public Health, he is extremely active in advising governments on the pandemic, and he brings Harvard millions of dollars a year in funding. But when he tries to hire someone at his lab, the university refuses because there is hiring freeze! Sorry, no hiring for pandemic research during a pandemic. In my talk on US Pandemic Policy I discuss the similar failure of the Yale School of Public Health and how miraculously and absurdly Tyler stepped in to save the day. The rot is deep.
Melton also notes the difference in speed of response between the public and private/commercial sector:
Polls have shown that principal investigator biologists now spend up to 40 percent of their time—it’s a shocking number, 40 percent of their time—writing grants.
In industry, the funding allows for very rapid change. There’s no writing a grant and waiting six months to see if it could get funded, and then waiting another six months for the university to make arrangements to receive the funds. The speed with which you can move into a new area is not comparable.
Years ago, the pharmaceutical industry rarely did discovery research. But now, pharmaceutical companies do basic science. That’s been a good shift, in my opinion, but it’s been a shift.
“The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university.”
Everything gets done much quicker. For example, when you want to file for a patent at a company, the next morning there are two patent attorneys in your office ready to write that patent. The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university. It’s a whole order of magnitude different.
Our last hire at GMU took well over a year to complete. It’s outrageous. There are no functional reasons why universities should be so slow. Don’t forget, Harvard has an endowment of $50 billion!
Melton also asks whether a new private-public partnership model is possible:
Why can’t we find a way—since many of our undergraduates and graduates will end up working in industry—why can’t we find a way for them to do their studies and their Ph.D. and their postdoctoral work in conjunction with Harvard, with MIT, and with Vertex? There are reasons for that, but we haven’t been imaginative enough to think about a compromise.
Hat tip: R.P.
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